The First Ones
by godfreyraphael
Summary: Three days ago, Raisa Cohen was human. Tonight, she no longer is. The creatures that she had long thought existed only in books, movies, TV and her imagination are actually real, and now she's one of them. Vampire lore taken from Twilight, Moonlight, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Rated T just to be sure.
1. Reborn

A/N: I have been obsessed with vampires ever since I was young. I remember that my obsession started sometime in 2007 or 2008, which if I remember correctly was the rise of _Twilight_ fever. This was also the time that a TV series called _Moonlight_ premiered, and it was about a vampire detective. _Moonlight_ and _Twilight_ were the two things directly responsible for my current obsession with vampires, and in my young and impressionable mind, it only made sense for me to combine the lore of these two to create a vampire that was created through both venom and vampire blood. I wrote a bunch of stories concerning vampires that were created by a combination of vampire venom and vampire blood at that time, stories that while I wouldn't want to release to the rest of the world in their current shape and format (because they're both short and shit in hindsight) I would most certainly love to come back to and incorporate in my new and improved vampire story.

There was a period where I lost interest in vampires and instead I focused on writing on other shall we say more realistic topics, but then my interest in vampires was rekindled by the release of the film version of _Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter_. I had also read the book version in a library and now have a copy of the book for myself and elements of the lore from AL:VH will most certainly find their way in my story.

Anyway, I won't bore you with any more details and walls of text about my obsession with vampires. Sit back, relax, and enjoy my latest story, and my first official story about vampires. That is, of course, if you dare to enjoy the darkness. – GR

* * *

The first thing that I remembered was the fire. The white hot, intense, all-consuming fire that was burning me from the inside out. It was all that I could remember; things so trivial like my name and my age were completely and utterly irrelevant. But as the pain of the fire slowly started to fade away, a few dim memories began to make their way back to the forefront of my mind. These memories were murky, like I was looking at them through very muddy water. My name was Raisa, Raisa Cohen. I was 21 years old. I had gone out with some of my friends from the cheerleading squad to watch a movie and now, inexplicably, I was here.

But where was here? It certainly wasn't my home, since I was not homeless and didn't live in an alley. I had no idea at all of how I had ended up here hiding behind trash bags and a Dumpster. I had memories, or rather flashes of memory, where I could feel a sharp pain on my neck, and I was running and stumbling on a rain-soaked street trying to run away from… someone… or something. All throughout these flashes of memory, the only thing that I could clearly discern was the fire that had erupted to life from my neck and then spread all throughout the rest of my body. Had I been attacked? Why was I on fire? How come I'm still alive after I had been burned alive? What was going on? What was happening to me?

I blinked my eyes, and it was only then that I noticed something really strange. The shining streetlights were telling me that it was nighttime, and I do remember that it was night before the fire erased all of my other memories, but somehow this alley was lit up like it was high noon. It didn't make sense to me, and yet, there was a small part of my mind that told me that this made perfect sense. I looked at a nearby streetlight and was surprised to see that aside from the white light from the LED inside, I could also make out the colors of the rainbow on the edges of the white light, along with an eighth color that I couldn't describe. I took my eyes away from the light before the afterimage burned itself into my retina.

I then looked down at my hands and saw that they were now white, whiter than a sheet of paper. I'm not talking about being just pale-skinned, I'm talking about the fact that I have practically become the living embodiment of white. I closed my hands into fists, and the first thing I noticed was that my fingers were now gliding smoothly over my palms. I then turned my hands around and saw that the top of my hands were now of a similar shade of white that was the same as that on my palms.

I then became curious of what had happened to my neck and why the fire that had consumed me had started from there. I lifted up my right hand and touched the spot on my neck where I could dimly remember the attacker, whoever he or it was, striking me. I felt nothing, nothing except more of the same smoothness that I had experienced when my fingers had stroked my palms. It was as if there was no evidence at all of the attack on me. I then looked down to my shirt, specifically the part of my collar nearest to the spot where I had thought I had been wounded, and I was surprised to see a good amount of blood, my blood, on my shirt, along with a mysterious golden brown stain. Seeing that much blood on my shirt made me gasp, and as I did that, I noticed that while my chest was expanding thanks to the air now in my lungs, it was as if my lungs no longer actually needed the air to breathe. I let out the gasp I had inhaled and tried holding my breath, but there was no sensation of suffocation at all. _That was strange_ , I thought to myself, but it wasn't as strange as all of the blood on my shirt with no evidence of a wound or anything on me at all.

I sniffed at the stain and smelled nothing except for the coppery tang of my own dried blood. A crazy thought then grabbed me, and I stuck out my tongue to lick at my blood. I don't know why I did it, but I did it anyway. And nothing happened. I tasted nothing from my dried blood and the other liquid that had stained my shirt.

Suddenly, I was seized by a very intense, unpleasant and disturbing sensation of extreme thirst. My throat and my mouth felt dry, parched even. I tried pooling some saliva in my mouth and swallowing that to quench my thirst, but it didn't work. My thirst then crowded out every other thought in my mind, even the fire that appeared to have brought me to this situation in the first place, until it was the only thing that I could ever think of. My body was telling me that I needed to drink something, and fast.

Slowly, shakily, I got up on my feet, although even though I felt shaky trying to stand up I also felt a certain smoothness and grace in doing it. I looked around, trying to find my bearings and match up my location to where I last dimly remembered myself being. I saw a bus stop on the street ahead of me, and a fading memory of standing and waiting around in that very same bus stop rose up in my mind to briefly interrupt the raging thirst in my throat, and I began making my way towards that bus stop. I could also remember, very dimly, that there was a convenience store just a short walk away from that bus stop, so now a new plan began to form in my mind.

In just a few seconds, I had gone from the alley where I had regained consciousness to the convenience store just a few steps away from the bus stop. I pushed open the door and I immediately headed for the drinks section. I opened one of the refrigerators, reached for the biggest bottle of water that I could find and began drinking. And yet, even though I had already drunk half of the water in the bottle, which was marked as being 1.5 liters, my throat still felt drier than the Sahara Desert. I could feel the water sloshing around in my stomach but it was like it had had no effect at all on my thirst. "What the hell?" I asked myself. "Why aren't you working!?" I demanded the water as I downed the rest of it. And still nothing happened to my thirst.

I tossed the now-empty bottle aside and decided to go for an energy drink. I emptied the smaller bottle in just one or two gulps but still, my thirst remained. Also, I happened to notice that I couldn't taste the flavor of the energy drink at all. A very distant and long-ago part of me could distantly remember what an energy drink tasted like, and right now I was not getting the same taste from this energy drink at all. In fact, the energy drink tasted just like the water that I had drunk earlier. Was that what the fire had done to me? Burned off my taste buds so that I couldn't taste anything at all?

I slunk off to another corner of the convenience and grabbed a packet of salted potato chips. I tore open the packet and began eating one of the chips, and once again I could taste nothing. Sure, I could feel the potato chip itself and the salt crystals in my mouth but I couldn't taste it, you know what I mean? It was as if I was eating paper or cardboard; I couldn't taste anything at all. I spat out the chip in my mouth and threw away the bag of chips.

I heard footsteps walking towards me, and I waited for what felt like an eternity before I felt the presence of the cashier walking up behind me. "Miss, you do know that you're going to have to pay for all this, right?" the cashier, who in my mind looked like a thin pimply teenaged boy who was probably the same age as me, said to me.

"What did you do to your food?" I asked him back. "Why doesn't it taste like anything at all?"

"I don't know," the cashier kid replied. "I mean, you know how they make this stuff. It's all factory-made and processed and full of chemicals and shit. You still have to pay for all of this, though."

Perhaps it was because of the absurdity of the whole situation or maybe because it was just what people would normally do, but not once did I question the fact that I had to pay for all of the stuff that I drank and ate in a futile attempt to quench my thirst. I stood up and began searching for my wallet, hoping against hope that whoever or whatever had attacked me wasn't interested in my money or my phone at all. "Hang on, I'm trying to find my wallet," I said, and I turned towards the cashier. I didn't know what I was expecting him to do, but it most certainly wasn't him screaming "Shit!" and then running away from me as fast as possible. The kid shouted a continuous string of curses as he juked his way around the aisles to get to the door as fast as he could, and then he ran out of the store and left the place practically abandoned.

"What the hell?" I asked myself, and then I happened to glance at my reflection on the glass of the refrigerator, and I gasped and stepped back in surprise. What the hell had happened to me? What did that fire in my body do to me? I was as white as a ghost. Every part of my body, my skin, that had once had color was now gone, replaced by a uniform whiteness. Even the freckles on my nose and the tops of my cheeks were gone, and only plain and smooth white skin remained in their place. But that wasn't the most surprising thing about the new me. My eyes, they were no longer the brown that I once remembered them to be. No, my eyes were now a bright and fiery red, red as blood.

And it was at that moment that I realized that I was no longer human. I was now something else entirely.

I had always thought that they only existed in books, TV, and the movies. But no, vampires are very much real, and now it looks I'm one of them. And not just any vampire too. Looks like I'm now one of the vampires from _Twilight_.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you're probably thinking right now. "But Raisa, _Twilight_ is just a book! There's no such thing as vampires!" Well, guess what? I was looking at my reflection right then and there, and I'm telling you, I very much looked like what Bella Swan described herself to be in _Breaking Dawn_. White as a statue, light reflecting off of my crystal skin, and very much the image of perfection, never mind the bright blood red eyes. If that isn't an accurate description of a vampire according to the _Twilight_ series then I don't know what is.

And because I now knew what I had become, everything else finally made sense to me. I had been attacked by another vampire who drank my blood, but something must have happened while he or she was feeding on me because I was able to run away from them before they could drain me of my blood, and it was actually the venom in me that had turned me into a vampire. It was the venom that had burned me and consumed me until I was now new and something else entirely. And my unquenchable thirst? It was only unquenchable because I was not drinking blood. But because I now knew what I needed to do, my thirst was no longer the biggest and only thing in my mind. In fact, I was already forming a plan.

I navigated the aisles of the store and went out, intending to chase down that cashier who had seen me for what I had become. I could smell his fear and nervousness in the air, and I turned right, back to the alley where I had been reborn. The guy had just kept running straight through, and I began to run myself, and as I did that I noticed that I was rapidly eating up the distance between us.

And then I encountered another scent, and my mind went immediately from hunting mode to defense. The scent was coming from behind me, and it smelled of rotting meat. And now I felt like I had turned from being the hunter to the hunted. But that was impossible. I was a vampire. I was now indestructible. What other creature on Earth could be a danger to a vampire like me?

And then my mind paused to think. If vampires were real, why not other supernatural creatures like werewolves? Was I being stalked by a werewolf right here and now? I slowed down to walk just long enough to look over my shoulder. I saw a man, maybe in his thirties, wearing a gray hoodie and baggy pants, walking some distance behind me, but he was also the only one walking behind me. Even my enhanced vision couldn't make out more of his features other than a generic-looking man with a sharp, thin nose and a bald head. And then I noticed that his eyes were white, and the only color in them were the black pupils in the center, and a shiver crawled up my spine. I swallowed, took a deep breath, and then I made a sudden right turn into another dark alley.

I didn't know what I was thinking when I made that turn into that alley. All I knew was that I had barely pressed myself against the brick wall before the man who had been following me suddenly appeared right in front of me, and he now had his left hand on my neck. I squirmed under the pressure, and my mind was in panic mode. I was supposed to be made of near-unbreakable stone now! How was this man able to squeeze my neck to the point that I felt that he would be able to take my whole head off if he wanted?

"You know, you don't look like the others," the man said, and I could now clearly see his pale face, the veins popping out on the surface of his skin, the red-rimmed eyes, the milky white irises, and the fat and sharp fangs in the corners of his mouth. "You're whiter than the rest, and you don't smell like them at all, but I can still smell the blood in you. And little girl, I'm sorry, but I need that blood more than you do." He snarled, and then he opened his mouth wide and made to slam his fangs into the part of my body between my neck and my shoulder.

"No! Please!" I cried out even as the other vampire moved in for the kill. Except what happened was that I felt nothing on me except something like the light touch of two fingers on my neck and shoulders, and the other vampire, the one with the white eyes, reeled back in surprise and alarm as he clutched at his mouth. I looked down and saw the shattered remains of his fangs on the ground. "What are you!?" the other vampire shouted. "You're not human! What the hell are you?"

I had no time to reply. I had seen the blood flowing in his veins even as he no longer had a beating heart in his chest, and my thirst overcame everything else in my mind and I pushed myself off of the wall and attacked him the same way that he had attacked me. I had no fangs of my own but I knew that my teeth were incredibly sharp. My teeth cut through the man's flesh like there was nothing at all, and he let out a short and pained cry as I began to suck the blood out of him. The blood was awful; it was rotten, stinky, and foul-tasting, but blood was blood, and I finally began to feel some relief from the burning thirst in my throat as I drank the other vampire's blood.

The other vampire didn't move, didn't try to defend himself. My venom was most probably paralyzing him with pain and fire, but I didn't care for that anymore. All that mattered was that I was finally drinking my fill. Yet strangely enough, even as I drank his blood, another fire, similar to the one I had experienced as I was being turned but somehow much hotter and more intense, sparked to life in my mouth. This fire then traveled down to my throat and my stomach, and then it began to spread all throughout my body. My arms and legs felt like they were on fire once again when I finally drained this other vampire dry, and I barely noticed the way that he looked like a deflated bag before the fire hit my solid and frozen heart, and I gasped in surprise once again, and I fell back down to the ground and leaned back on the wall.

What the hell was happening to me? Was I being burned alive once again because I had killed another vampire? (A different kind of vampire than me, granted, but still a vampire.) Why was I on fire once again? The fire was hottest where my frozen husk of a heart used to be, and now I was beginning to regret drinking the other vampire's blood.

The fire was much, much hotter than the one that had turned me into a vampire in the first place. How was this possible? The fire was now spreading itself right to my fingers and toes, and I began to hyperventilate even though my frozen lungs no longer needed the air. These huge gulps of air allowed me to taste the rotting and decay coming from the other vampire, who looked like he was decomposing right in front of my eyes. So there were at least two types of vampire walking the earth, the kind that look like the vampires from _Twilight_ and the ones that look more like classical vampires. I wondered if there were even more kinds of vampires in the part of my mind that still hadn't yet been touched by the fire.

Suddenly, a blast furnace erupted to life in the husk that had once been my heart. The fire was so hot and painful that my lips parted and let loose a scream that could have shattered the heavens. I had never felt pain as intense as this, not even the fire that had transformed me in the first place. I thrashed around in a futile effort to lessen the pain. Spending any more time in this crematorium of my own making was almost not worth quenching my thirst in the first place. I let out another shriek and then my body, which had not yet experienced any tiredness or rest since I first awakened after my turning, slipped into unconsciousness.

It would be only a very brief respite from the pain. As soon as I lost consciousness, the fire in me brought me back to my hellish existence, and I wondered whether I was actually truly dead now. I laughed at my own joke, and the effort to smile cracked my lips open once again, and it coincided with a renewed intensity in the fire in my body and I cried out once again, but this time my shouting was strangled and almost choking. My legs and arms twisted around the place where I lay burning, and all I could hope for now was that a respite, any respite from my fate, would finally come soon.

Minutes stretched into hours, hours stretched into days, and the days stretched out into an indeterminate eternity that was as viscous as the venom of a vampire. Finally though, the fire began to retreat from my limbs. My fingers and toes, my hands and feet, and eventually my arms and legs finally burned themselves out, and I could feel them having been rendered warm and soft by the fire. I tried to move them, look at them, but they felt numb. All I could feel from them now were pins and needles. Was this the end? Was the fire in me finally going to be extinguished?

And then, as if in reply to the question in my mind, the fire in my body raced back to my heart with unnerving speed, and I felt a pain so intense and fiery that words just couldn't describe it. Imagine being dropped right into the core of the sun. Now multiply that feeling by a hundred, even a thousand. That was still just a miniscule fraction of the burning pain that I was experiencing.

Twisting my ankle during cheerleading practice. That was nothing. That was lying down on a soft down bed. I would gladly have my ankle twisted a thousand times more and be grateful for the experience.

Vampire venom burning and turning me into an immortal. Even that can't compare to what I was feeling now. That was skinny-dipping in a cool mountain lake in summertime. I would rather have vampire venom in my veins once again and never look back at what could have been.

It was as if a star had come to life inside my chest, in the dried husk that had once been my heart. The fire had finally left my body behind as a warm and smoldering pile of ashes, and it was now concentrating its efforts to consuming my heart, the only part of my body left that was still resisting the fire. The fire intensified its attacks on my heart even as it refused to bend to the will of the fire. My throat was now rubbed raw and could no longer summon any more strength to scream or even say or mutter anything about this fire, and all I could do now was keep gulping in air that I thought I no longer needed. The fire licked at my heart once again, and my back arched up and then slammed back down onto the wall where I had been leaning since this fire started.

And then, just as quickly as it had started, the fire in my chest went out, and my head fell forward and I went unconscious once again. I don't know how long I was out this time, but I could also feel time passing me by. Everything was so silent, so still. I was aware of myself, but beyond me, I don't know if there was anything else. I wasn't even sure that I existed or if anything existed at all. I was a mere speck of dust in the vastness of space. I was both everything and nothing at the same time. Was this death? Was this what death feels like?

And then, from both the dark vastness of space and inside the depths of my own being, I heard a sound, an aberration that I had not yet heard since I first woke up as a vampire. It was a single loud heartbeat, and it felt as if it had come from the middle of my chest. But did it come from my heart? Could it have come from my heart? If it did, how could it have come from my heart? It had been frozen still and rendered silent by the vampire venom in my veins, so how was it beating once again?

There it was again, that heartbeat. I was now confidently sure that it was a heartbeat, and that it was coming from my heart. And I could also hear something else alongside my heartbeat. I could hear the microvolts of electricity trying to shock my heart back to life and stir it back into a regular rhythm.

And then finally, it happened. The third heartbeat sounded through my chest, and it was the beat that finally jolted my heart back to life, and it began to beat stronger than I could ever remember it beating before. And at the very same moment that my heart returned to life, I was also returned to life, and I opened my eyes to gaze upon the second new me.

I didn't know what I was expecting to see. I could still see every dust mote in the air, every detail in the brick wall and the asphalt on the alley as well as the eight-color rainbow coming from the streetlights. The alley was still lit up like it was morning when in fact it was still night. Suddenly, my lungs demanded air for the first time since I realized that I was now a vampire, and my mouth and my nose were more than happy to oblige. I sucked in air, and a swirling vortex of air formed in front of me, sending the dust motes spinning every which way. The air inflated my lungs and gave me a blessed sense of relief, and it also allowed me to smell and taste the air. The rotten odor that I had faintly picked up from the other vampire before was now much more overwhelming to my nose, and I actually gagged a little bit at the smell.

I can't describe the smell really well. It was both sweet and sickly at the same time, kind of like vomit, except vomit was way stronger than this smell. This smell was coming right from the vampire whose blood I had just drained, and when I turned to look at him, I saw that he was still breathing, or more accurately he was gasping. I don't know what he was trying to do, and I don't know how he could still be alive despite me sucking him dry, but at this point nothing was too strange for me anymore.

My lungs demanded air once again, and I gulped in as much air as I could while at the same time trying not to focus on the sickly sweet smell coming from the body of the other vampire. I don't know how long I sat there staring at the other vampire as he tried to get back up or even just sit up, and then my body finally felt tired as it could ever be and my eyelids began to grow heavy. I drifted in and out of sleep, and because of that, I got only flashes and glimpses of what happened next. I saw two men walk into the alley, a pale-skinned redhead and a black man, and I remember the red-headed man walking up to me and looking at me, and then I went unconscious once again.


	2. Eyes Opened

When I opened my eyes once again, for just one seemingly blissful second, it seemed to me as if everything that had happened to me before this point was just a very long and awful dream, that I had not been turned into a vampire and that I had not just sucked another vampire dry of his own blood. I was lying in bed, and for a very brief moment I thought that I was back in my room, and that everything that I thought had happened to me in the past few nights was a nightmare that had finally come to an end. But once I finally got a good look at the room I was in, I soon realized that the nightmare was still going on. This room was not my room. The bed I was lying on was most certainly not my bed, and I never ever slept in my underwear. The fact that my underwear was also mismatched (white bra and gray panties) only added to my own confusion and distress.

I then noticed a small pile of neatly folded clothes at the foot of the bed, and I got up and immediately put them on. The clothes were a little bit loose in some areas like the shirt sleeves and the waistband, and tight in other areas like the bust and my thighs, but nevertheless they actually fitted me very well. I also found my sandals on the floor, and I put them on before I made to look around this room. The room was light, airy, and cheery, an effect brought about by the white-painted walls and large wide windows. There was a large dresser in front of me, but strangely enough, there was no mirror in it. The frame of the missing mirror was filled with photographs of a girl with black hair, pale white skin, and bright gray eyes. She looked very much my age, but then I noticed that the photos appeared to have come from different times, and the girl's dresses and clothes seemed to reflect the age of the photos themselves. And then I noticed one particular picture which appeared to be taken recently, and it showed the girl standing beside the same red-haired man that I last remembered seeing before I blacked out. The two of them looked very close, and I got the vibe that the two of them were very much like siblings.

The air in here also smelled of that strange sickly sweet smell that I had smelled from that other vampire which I had bitten and drank blood from just before I blacked out. It still smelled of dried vomit, but this time around, there were other smells mixed in with it, and I thought I could make out both freshly picked oregano and potatoes alongside the sickly sweet scent. The smell seemed to be coming from outside the room, and although an instinctive part of me was telling me to run as far away from this sickly sweet smell as possible, the thinking part of me wanted to find the source of this smell.

So I walked out of the room and found myself in a short hallway leading to what appeared to be a kitchen. On one wall of this hallway hung a row of framed diplomas, all coming from various colleges and universities and seemingly arranged by age. The ones nearest to the room where I had come from appeared to be the oldest, and I could barely make out the text written in faded ink, but I did see that the diploma had been awarded to one Patrick Thomas Macclearkins. The next diploma was still old but the ink was not as faded, and this one had been given to a Thomas Patrick Counihan. As I went down the hallway, I saw that the names on the diplomas were all variations in one way or another of these two names, and a few times I saw the names combined into Patrick Thomas Counihan Macclearkins. The last diploma, the one nearest to the end of the hallway, went back to Patrick Thomas Macclearkins and had been given to him by West Virginia University for a degree in Forensics. I reached out and made to touch the frame protecting the diploma from the environment, and I imagined running my fingers over the embossed designs on the paper…

"Ah, you're finally awake," a soft and boyish voice called out. I literally jumped in surprise, and I think I even yelped a little. The red-haired man I had seen in my "dreams" and the picture in the room where I had just come from was standing right there in the kitchen, and he had been wiping his hands with a white towel. The sickly sweet smell seemed to be coming right from him, and my immediate reaction was to move away from him. A rasping hiss escaped my throat, and my vision became tinged with red. I could see the blood vessels underneath his skin, along with his heart beating rapidly in his chest. I also felt two sharp points digging into my lower lip, and I instinctively opened my mouth to keep the points from drawing blood.

"Whoa," the red-haired man said, raising his hands to his chest. "Easy there, Young One. I am not your enemy right now. I know that your instinct is to run away from me as far as you possibly can, but believe me, I mean you no harm. If I had wanted to hurt you or kill you then we would not even be having this conversation in the first place."

I pondered his words, and I decided that he had a point. I remembered how easy it had been for me to bite that other vampire and suck him dry, although that being said, I was supposed to be unbreakable, my skin impenetrable.

"I know you've got a lot of questions," the red-haired man continued, "and I will be more than happy to answer them, but first, I need you to calm yourself down and restrain your instincts. Right now, your instincts are very, very strong, but I can teach you control them. Just close your eyes and concentrate on yourself, your face. Remember the face you had when you were still human. Concentrate on that, and then we can finally talk."

I did as the man asked and thought of my face, the face that I once had before all of this had happened. At least I tried to think of my human face, but my other face, the one that I had seen when I had first woken up into this nightmare, my white and crystalline face, began intruding into my thoughts. I shook my head hard, as if that would get rid of the images of that white hardened face and burning bright red eyes from my mind. Eventually I managed to call back to mind a faded memory of an oval face with chestnut brown eyes, a flat nose, and a mass of light yet still noticeable freckles covering the tops of my cheeks and the bridge of my nose. I concentrated long and hard on that memory, and eventually I felt blood rushing back to my face, and I dared to open my eyes again. The red tinge in my vision was gone, and I couldn't feel anything trying to poke holes into my lips anymore.

"Well done, Young One," the man said with a proud fatherly smile. "Now come to me. Don't worry, I don't bite," he added with a toothy grin.

I have to admit that I was still not very keen on getting any closer to the man than I already was. But the man did seem to be genuinely nice and not trying to lure me into some sort of trap, and that sickly sweet smell that I had sniffed on him earlier was no longer as strong as it had been before, although whether it was just because I had had enough time to become used to it or not, I didn't really know. But I did finally overcome my instinct and walked towards the man, into his kitchen.

"That's a good girl," the man said as he held out a hand for me to take. "Welcome to my humble abode. I am Patrick Macclearkins, but I believe you knew that already. Oh, and call me Paddy. And your name is…?"

"Raisa," I replied immediately and instinctively. "Raisa Cohen."

"Ah, Raisa," Paddy repeated. "Are you thirsty? Would you like anything to drink? I assume that you would like to have a drink. Come on, sit down. Don't be shy."

"I mean, I really am thirsty," I replied. "But I don't know if you have exactly what I'm looking for…"

"Oh, come now, Young One," Paddy said with a grin. "We're all the same kind in here. You can talk freely with me."

"So you're a vampire," I asked him.

"I think that should already be obvious but yes, I am a vampire," Paddy replied. "Maybe not really proud to be one, but it's the card I was dealt, and I've been making the best out of the situation anyway."

"So you have fangs and stuff? And you drink blood?"

"That is the definition of a vampire, and I do qualify on both counts. But are you sure that you don't want to have a drink first? Because I really believe that you must be thirsty as heck right now."

In truth, I had never really thought a lot about my thirst, but now that Paddy had mentioned it, the thirst was the only thing that was on my mind right now. I coughed a little and swallowed my saliva, but I knew from prior experience that that was not going to work at all.

"Not to worry, Raisa, I can help you with that," Paddy said as he stood up and walked to his refrigerator. "Just give me your blood type and I can get you sorted out soon enough. You do know your blood type, right?"

"Um, yeah, it's A negative," I replied. "Why do you want to know?"

"A negative, A negative," Paddy repeated to himself as he rooted around in his fridge. "Your own blood type is always the best blood to drink no matter the occasion," he said in reply to my question. "I don't know how or why, but apparently blood that matches your blood type tastes the best. Aha, there we are," he muttered as he eventually came out with a bottle filled with a thick and viscous red liquid, and as soon as I laid eyes on that bottle, the thirst in my throat turned into a burning desire that drove out almost every other thought in my mind.

"Easy there, Young One," Paddy said when he noticed what had to be the hungriest look I have ever had in my eyes. "I'll get you your blood soon enough." Paddy poured out some blood from the bottle into a glass, and then he handed the glass over to me. I practically snatched the glass out of Paddy's hands and began gulping down the blood like one of those kids in those milk commercials. There was a strange sort of chemical taste in the blood, but I tried to ignore it as I was finally drinking the substance that was so important to me now. "Ah, that's the anticoagulant you're probably tasting right there," Paddy said. "You have to understand why we have to have it in our blood now; it's just the price of long-term storage. But just keep drinking and you'll soon get used to the taste."

I mean, he wasn't wrong. The more I drank the blood, the less I noticed the taste of the anticoagulant. Eventually I drained the glass dry, and I had to take a few deep breaths as my heart pumped the new blood around my body. "Another one?" Paddy asked me. I nodded, and he topped up my glass once again. I drank more slowly this time, taking more measured sips and giving my body more time to digest or absorb the blood or whatever happens to blood in a vampire's body.

"All right, that should do it for you right now," Paddy said as he took the now empty glass away from me. "Don't want you to be too bloated before you've even had lunch."

"Lunch?" I managed to gasp even as I tried not to move too much because, like Paddy had said, I was actually feeling kind of bloated. And it wasn't just any ordinary bloating either, as in it wasn't just my stomach that felt full and bursting. I felt as if my entire body was going to explode if I so much as made one sudden move. But the idea that I would have to eat after all of that… Well, I didn't know what to think.

"Are you serious?" I asked Paddy. "Are you seriously offering me lunch? Can we even eat regular food? I thought that glass was already our feeding done for the day."

"Oh, you really have much left to learn, Young One," Paddy laughed as he sat down. "I really have a lot left to teach you, but the good thing is that we both have the rest of time to talk all about it. But to start off, yes, we can eat regular human food. We kind of have to, you know. As I understand it, we may be vampires, but we still have bodily needs aside from the bloodthirst. Aside from the bloodthirst, we still have to eat and drink. I mean, we are basically humans who need to drink blood in order to sustain our near-immortal lives. The other kinds of vampires don't need to eat, but our kind does."

"Other kinds? You mean there's more than one?" I asked incredulously.

"Oh, yes," Paddy smiled. "And I believe that will explain a lot of the things you've gone through yourself, but I would rather talk about it over a good hearty meal."

"Okay, sure," I said, "but I'm not sure that I can really eat anything that you can offer me."

"But why not indulge me in this one thing, yeah? I've had a really big meal prepped and ready for you while you were sleeping, and I don't really want to waste it."

"All right, fine, I'll try, but I can't promise that I'll be able to keep any of it down," I said as I sat down at the table in front of Paddy.

"Oh, I think you'll be surprised," Paddy said with a grin as he slid over a plate heaping with food over to me. "I tried to get in as much as I could in there," he said. "Proteins, carbs, vitamins; meat, eggs, leafy greens; you name it, I got it in there. Eat up, do, Raisa. I promise you that you'll get your strength back in no time, and that you will regret none of it."

I shrugged, picked up the knife and fork that Paddy had laid out for me along with the plate, and began to eat. Like he said, I had nothing left to lose by eating, and if ever I couldn't keep the food down, at least I knew that he would understand why. And then the flavors hit me, and I almost stopped eating because of it. Remember that time when I had tried to eat before, and everything I put in my mouth (except for the blood, of course) tasted like nothing at all? Well, things were very much different now. It was like my taste buds had not only returned to life, but they had acquired newer and more tastes and sensations. Rich and intense flavors burst to life in my mouth, so intense that my brain had to take its sweet time processing all of this information. It was like I was tasting everything for the first time in my life, and I guess that was true from a certain point of view. A small part of me had come to accept that I would never be able to eat food again for the rest of my now-immortal life, but once all these flavors came in contact with my tongue, I knew for certain that I was relieved that I was going to be able to eat again. Even food that I wouldn't have touched in my human life like sprouts, asparagus, and broccoli now became wonderful things that I wouldn't mind eating over and over again.

Paddy smiled as he watched me tuck into my food with gusto. "Food really does taste lovely now, doesn't it?" he asked me. "Yes, it's one of the few things where being a vampire is actually a good thing. Our tongues are now so sensitive that they can pick up every flavor, every subtle hint. And the Big Man always said that eating, drinking, and sleeping are the three greatest and simplest pleasures that a man, a vampire can have, and I'm happy to say that we First Ones are lucky enough to be able to do all three of them."

"The Big Man? The First Ones?" I asked through a mouthful of food. "Who's he? And who are they?"

"The Big Man? Oh, it's just one of the names that we use to talk about the First Vampire," Paddy replied. "He's got so many because he's so old. Like, the man is at least twelve thousand years old. I mean, he's so old, I think he's actually forgotten what his original name really was. But it's probably something simple like Ur or Merv. I don't know though, really. It's just a theory. And he doesn't really like to talk about it."

"And the First Ones? Who are they?" I repeated.

"Simply put, Raisa, the First Ones are exactly who they say they are," Paddy replied. "They are the first vampire race to ever come into existence. Every other vampire race stems from them, from us. We are First Ones, Raisa."

"How many of us are there?" I asked. "And how many other vampire races are out there?"

"There's quite a lot of us, actually. Both much more than you think and not as much as you think. Confusing, yeah? As for actual numbers, I'd say there are between a million and two million of us. We're practically a small nation, but we're not really interested in the whole taking over the world and enslaving humanity for their blood thing. At least the vamps I know aren't really into that kind of thing. We can blend in easily enough as it is. And it's not like we can only move around at night. Daylight don't affect us at all. The sunlight does sting the eyes a bit, but it's nothing shades and a cap can't remedy."

"But how many other vampire races are there?"

"Strictly speaking, there are only two other vampire kinds out there, aside from the First Ones," Paddy explained. "Those are the Venomborn and the Bloodborn. That should give you a clue or two as to how they're made. Now, technically speaking, the Bloodborn are divided into further subspecies, so to speak, depending on how vampire blood affects them, but in the interests of simplicity, we lump them all together into a single group, the Bloodborn. The clues about their differences are in their names. The Bloodborn were created from the blood of the vampires, while the Venomborn were, ahem, born from our venom."

"What's the difference between the two of them, and what's their difference with you? Us?" I asked.

"That's easy enough," Paddy said. "Ever heard of this book called _Twilight_?"

"Um, I think the whole world has," I replied with a tone hinting that the answer should have been obvious. "Much as some of us would rather not have."

"Yeah, well, it gives a really great and almost accurate picture of the Venomborn," Paddy replied. "I was actually surprised at the amount of detail and even accuracy in the book when I first picked it up. I kind of feel that even though those books claim to be fiction, there's some truth behind all of that romantic fluff. The Venomborn are indeed vampires with white rock-hard skin that sparkles in the sun, and I've certainly seen my fair share of Venomborns who would rather drink animals' blood than human. And the coven and territory wars between the Venomborn did happen, as too does the Volturi. I'm actually surprised that not only did a human know about the Volturi, but the Volturi actually allowed their existence to become public knowledge for the humans. There are certain things in the books about Venomborns that are either plain wrong or just inaccurate, but I have a feeling that those changes were made just to keep enough of the truth about the Venomborn on the down low and not really out in the open. But the crystalline fuckers really do sparkle under the sun."

"And we don't do that, do we?" I asked. "The First Ones don't sparkle in sunlight, right?"

"Yeah, that's true," Paddy nodded. "I mean, it's certainly enough to just be able to walk around in the sun without having to flaunt it to everyone else, yeah?"

"How about the Bloodborn? How are they different to everyone else?"

"There's actually a lot of stuff about the Bloodborn out there in the human media," Paddy said. "Some of them more accurate than others. Some of them are so off the mark, they're obviously some sort of Bloodborn false flag, for whatever purpose I do not know. But I've managed to come across a scarily accurate depiction of the Bloodborn before. Have you ever heard of a television show called _Moonlight_ , Raisa?"

"No, I can't say that I have," I shook my head.

"Well, I'm not surprised. The Bloodborn managed to get it off the air before it revealed too much about them. They covered it up as a combination of low ratings and the writers' strike, but the truth was that everyone was hooked to that show, and the Bloodborn had to get it off the air because it was revealing too much about them."

"They can do that?" I asked in a hushed whisper.

"Oh, yes," Paddy replied with a knowing nod. "They've got money, power, influence. It would be child's play for them to make a simple suggestion that this particular TV show shouldn't get renewed."

"But how can I tell the difference between a Bloodborn and a First One?"

"That's a tough question, mostly because there are a lot of Bloodborn kinds out there," Paddy said, "but if you're talking about the main kind of Bloodborn, the one we're sure to encounter the most, then there are a few key differences, some of them more subtle than others. For one thing, we First Ones can produce venom in our mouths while the Bloodborn can't. The Bloodborn are much more sensitive to sunlight than we are. They don't burn up in the sun but they don't enjoy it either. And silver messes them up some. We're also somewhat vulnerable to silver, but not in the way the Bloodborn are. I mean, give me any silver object and I can touch it, even grab it no problem. A Bloodborn can't do that without getting burns on their hand. However, if I get wounded, and somehow some silver ends up in contact with said wound, now that's going to sting for me. You think you got that all, lass?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "I mean, I can always ask you for a remedial course if I forget, right?" I asked with a smile of my own.

"Yeah, sure," Paddy nodded.

I continued eating from the plate that Paddy had given me. I was already halfway through the meal, and I didn't appear to be slowing down anytime soon. "So, how does someone become a First One?" I asked him. "And on the same vein, how does one become Venomborn or Bloodborn?"

"Well, to become a First One, it involves an overly long and complicated process which steps are shrouded in much mystery and are so complicated that I can't possibly explain it to you in just one afternoon alone," Paddy replied seriously. And then he noticed the surprised look on my face, and he broke out into a grin once again. "I'm just kidding, Young One," he said. "It's actually quite simple, really. So you already know that there is such a thing as vampire venom and vampire blood. To turn someone into a First One, just get some venom into their bloodstream, and then feed them some vampire blood. Both the blood and the venom will encounter each other in the body and interact, and it's the combination of both the blood and the venom that turns someone into a First One, a complete vampire, some of us would call it.

"Getting both the blood and the venom in the person is very important," Paddy continued. "Only the venom and that person becomes a Venomborn. Only the blood and they become a Bloodborn. I remember that there were certain conditions required in order to turn someone into a specific kind of Bloodborn but now that is something that's legitimately confusing and convoluted. I wouldn't get into that simply because it really is confusing, and it's not really that important to you in your first few days of immortality."

"But," I began, "is it possible for someone, maybe a Venomborn or a Bloodborn, to become a First One eventually? And can a First One become Venomborn or Bloodborn? Or are they destined to remain what they are forever, for the rest of their life?"

"Oh, going from Venomborn or Bloodborn to a First One is very much possible," Paddy replied. "You are one of those lucky ones, Raisa, and I do believe you already know that. But the other way around, now that's impossible. Once the venom and the blood come together and combine in a person's body, you can't ever separate them again. One metaphor describing the situation that I love is that vampirism is a one-way street: you can go in but you can never get out. And being Venomborn or Bloodborn is like being a station on a railway: a lot of people choose to stop there, but there's actually one more stop beyond, and that's becoming a First One."

"How did I…? How did I turn into a First One?" I asked. "I've never even met one of you guys until now."

"Ah, well, you didn't have to. Forgive me for saying this, but when I first saw you, you were still very much a Venomborn. I could still smell the venom in you. But you drank the blood of a Bloodborn, that vampire you sucked dry before you blacked out, and that blood mixed with the venom in your body and completed your transition, your transformation. That's how a Venomborn becomes a First One, by drinking the blood of a Bloodborn or another First One. It's the other way around if you're a Bloodborn looking to become a First One: you let yourself get bitten and envenomed by a First One or a Venomborn and wait."

"It was very painful," I muttered. "The fire, the blood, the pain, everything hurt."

"Oh, lass, I know exactly what you mean," Paddy said quietly.

Through it all, I had been eating the food that Paddy had offered me, and by the time that he had said that final sentence, I had licked the plate clean. As I set aside the knife and fork, I felt energized and invigorated, almost as much as I had when I had drank all that blood. "Ah, good, you're finally done," Paddy said. "Let me take care of that for you, yeah?" he asked, and before I had even replied, he had already taken the plate and began washing it in his sink. "Any other questions for me, lass?"

"You seem to know a lot about how vampires are made," I said. "Do all vampires know that, or are there like specialized vampires whose job it is to know how they're made so they can, um, I don't know, make more? Something like that?"

"I certainly know a lot more about the turning process than most," Paddy admitted. "It is kind of in my history."

"But what is your history, Paddy?" I asked. "I mean, how did you become a vampire? How old are you? Can I ask you that question? Or is that against the rules or vampire etiquette or whatever?"

"Nothing against the rules to ask someone their age," Paddy smiled. "I'm thirty going on five hundred, give or take. I've been in the business a really, really, really long time. And I can tell you how I got to be where I am right now. But first, we have to go back to the very beginning of my story. Are you ready?"

"Sure," I replied, genuinely curious about Paddy's own story.


End file.
